Alisson Amador releases “Quarto Universo” with 12 tracks recorded in Heliópolis
São Paulo composer and multi-artist Alisson Amador has reached the second album of his career with an entirely home-made project: twelve original tracks, every instrument played by himself, all recorded in his apartment in Heliópolis, in the south of São Paulo. The record is called “Quarto Universo” and carries a clear message against the logic of the ephemeral that dominates cultural production in the age of social media.
One musician, many instruments
Amador did not arrive at multi-functionality by accident. His relationship with instruments began at the age of ten, when he first picked up a keyboard. Since then, he has moved through the banjo, dived into rock with the guitar, played percussion in the Bacarelli Institute orchestra and studied classical guitar at Emesp, São Paulo’s Municipal School of Music. It is a path of more than two decades accumulating technical repertoire.
With more than 500 compositions in his catalogue, the artist is clear about what drives him. Recording the album at home was not a limitation – it was a deliberate choice. “With this time, I’ll record the album at home,” he says, after questioning the real return that compulsive production for social media brought to his career.
Tributes to Ailton Krenak and Zahy Tentehar
The album is not just instrumental music: it carries a stance. Among the twelve tracks, two pay tribute to Indigenous figures central to the contemporary debate on identity and territory. Ailton Krenak, philosopher and Krenak leader, had already inspired Amador on his first work, “Silêncio no Caos”, from 2021, when the artist set one of the thinker’s poems to music.
Zahy Tentehar, activist and artist of the Tentehar people, entered Amador’s path in a more visceral way. He met her at a theatre play that dealt with her relationship with her mother. “It is something very deep and I left there in tears,” he recounts. The tribute on the record is, therefore, something beyond recognition – it is an emotional response converted into song.
Resistance to immediacy
“Quarto Universo” arrives at a time when the independent music industry faces pressure for continuous, fragmented releases. Singles, playlists, content for Stories – the logic of the platforms favours the uninterrupted flow at the expense of the cohesive work. Amador goes in the opposite direction. An album with structure, identity and depth, produced at home, in one of the largest favelas in Latin America.
The gesture has symbolic weight. Heliópolis, with about 200,000 inhabitants, rarely appears as a centre of artistic production in the city’s cultural narratives. “Quarto Universo” puts the neighbourhood on the map – not as a backdrop, but as a studio.
